Between both parties the distance continues. They don’t love each other. They are not respected. They are jealous and, fundamentally, distrustful. And more today than before December 10, 2024. It was demonstrated in the last meeting of very important people from Llao Llao. But more so, due to two previous situations that Javier Milei experienced almost as if they were personal affectations. The President showed much more than a bewilderment and almost a lack of love, the fact of having verified during the first week of April, that the prices of the main foods offered on the shelves of the main supermarket chains in the country fell almost a 10% on average. The head of state has the data in his personal folder, and it belongs to several private consulting companies that have been measuring the evolution of prices for decades. And they show that a suspicion that Milei has been holding since the beginning of the year is beginning to be confirmed.
The President maintains that the country’s main businessmen who produce food, beverages and mass consumer goods betrayed his trust and increased the prices of their products, calculating the value of the dollar to 2 thousand pesos as of April.
Executing a common practice in times of pure and simple Kirchnerism: anticipating future financial, exchange and monetary runs, imposing various speculative prices for near future times and saving their accounting funds going forward. It is what at some point was called “Punk Pricing”. Or a pricing strategy under the criterion that there is no tomorrow, and that everything that can be earned sooner by speculating in worse times; Better to do it as soon as possible.
Authoritarians don’t like this
The practice of professional and critical journalism is a fundamental pillar of democracy. That is why it bothers those who believe they are the owners of the truth.
And the fact of having calculated between December and January prices for April 2024 with a dollar of 2 thousand pesos is, simply, a great act of pure and simple distrust in Milei’s abilities to be able to take the ship to a safe port for this time of his government, so early in its original projection. In other words, the businessmen who calculated that level of devaluation with its inevitable inflation did not directly believe that Milei could have had any kind of success in managing it. Or at least that’s how Milei experienced it personally. Seeing food prices rise more than the projected inflation and seeing that they now have some glimmer of decline, the head of state experienced a kind of deep disappointment. Much more than “They don’t see it” as Milei himself once defined them in a public interview. A real confirmation of what he always suspected and believed himself. And he continues to believe.
That they don’t trust him. And they act accordingly. And at the beginning of his administration they were part of the problem. Almost a conspiracy. A “punk” conspiracy. He felt the same sensation in the last fifteen days with another key sector in his economic policy. The personal decision to force the values of prepaid medicine to go back to levels almost from his arrival at the Casa Rosada, made him reflect hard on himself and his credibility on the ideological need to deregulate and free markets so that the invisible hand is the that places prices in their equilibrium places. He did not pass with prepaid (and surely with many other sectors); and Milei was forced to make a decision as tough as raising taxes: implement policies of direct economic intervention by the State to prevent abuses. The opposite of what he always believed and considered. And what he promised in the campaign. Another disappointment that reached the presidential heart from the “Red Circle.”
It has already been written in these lines that the country’s main businessmen call the head of state with a curiously derogatory adjective, which has more to do with his professional past than his present. For many of the participants at the Llao Llao summit, Milei is “The Armenian”, in reference to Eduardo Eurnekian, his work godfather, and who a decade and a half ago encouraged him to reach the media and who catapulted him to the big ones. leagues of the country’s elite economists. However, both the airport czar and the majority of his powerful colleagues had other preferences for the Casa Rosada, without showing much sympathy for his arrival at the top of power. Even in the days after December 10, there was no greater joy exhibited in the libertarian’s movements. Much less militancy.
Distrust has its genesis in events from a year ago. In the same place where they crossed paths this week. In the unique environments and landscapes designed in Bariloche by Alejandro Bustillo there was a gathering between Milei and Eduardo Elsztain, Marcos Bulgheroni, Marcos Galperin, Carlos Miguens, Federico Braun and Martín Migoya. Milei explained there, perhaps for the first time in detail, his dollarization plans and the demolition of the Central Bank; receiving, to his surprise, a lot of coldness in the face of the progress of his story, and finally complicated questions about a key issue that is still relevant today: how he will implement such macroeconomic feats without close political majorities.
There was no turning back. From that moment on, the country’s largest businessmen (to whom he had given countless talks for almost a decade) were described by the libertarian as part of “the caste.” And, consequently, material to be classified as enemies. He did it that way. To the point of even organizing an IDEA Counter-Summit, boycotting the traditional Mar del Plata event in October, where before a handful of businessmen he decreed that in his government the prebendary economy would end.